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Economists have the knack, be they followers of Milton Friedman or Lord Keynes, of looking for inflation in all the wrong places. This apparent flaw may, in fact, be something of a blessing in disguise, since it prevents them from mistakenly espying monster waves of inflation springing from this or that monetary or fiscal policy and rushing to recommend some painfully stringent remedial response, when, in fact, none is warranted. After all, there has been only one serious outburst of inflation in this blessed nation in the past three decades.

None of this is to foreclose the possibility that we may be setting ourselves up for another extended visit by the inflationary plague. If so, we can render all due thanks to the Messrs. Greenspan and Bernanke for keeping interest rates at zero come hell or high water. But to be fair, or more important, accurate, while the cost of food and fuel have spiraled upward, we're nowhere near the virulent and pervasive runaway inflation of the '70s and early '80s that Paul Volcker had to grapple with and pin to the mat.

What got us musing this way is not some obfuscating academic study but something much more appealing and a heap easier to digest -- the advent of the Super Bowl. Our erratic word processor may be running out of Roman numerals, but by our count this is No. XLVII. Not surprisingly, considering its popularity with the denizens of Wall Street, this contest has been endowed with the power of divination. More specifically, early on, the notion took hold that depending on the provenance of the team -- whether it was from the old National Football League or the upstart American Football League (before they merged) -- a victory would determine whether it would be a winning or losing year for the market.

Once the junior league reached a kind of maturity, enhanced by additional transfers of franchises, the idea that the origin of the team has some weirdo predictive capability had to be abandoned. In 2000, the inimitable Doug Kass devised his own Super Bowl indicator based on the television commercials. Specifically, as Doug explains it, the more intense the Super Bowl TV advertising by a group of companies, the more likely the stocks of those companies will perform poorly in the year ahead. So for this year's gladiatorial encounter, his reading of the roster of commercials suggests Super Bowl XLVII "head winds could be facing the food and beverage producers."

Comes now ConvergEx Group's third annual analysis of Super Bowl economics, and we're happy to report that it's pretty much upbeat. At least, if you're lucky enough to be well heeled. ConvergEx notes kind of breathlessly that the face value of a middle-of-the road ticket to the grand event is up $50, to $950 a seat, an all-time high, following what it dubs two years of stagnancy. But "resale tickets," the lair of hawkers and their kin—and which the firm claims is the market that really sets the price—is far more eye-popping: Last year, you had to pony up $2,990 for a the average purchase of a Super Bowl ticket online. This year, you'll have to shell out $3,398 for the same seat.

Moreover, every hotel but two in downtown New Orleans is booked, and a room in the pair that aren't is sky-high -- at least $2,600 a night, a mere 700% more than the usual tab. Airfare is 400% higher than its regular rate; rental cars, 300% higher; and parking your jalopy, triple the usual charge. For their part, advertisers are coughing up a record-high $4 million for a 30-second spot.

Sounds more like Groundhog Day than Super Bowl Sunday to us. But to the gimlet-eyed folks at ConvergEx, it smacks of "happy days are here again." At least for the high-end consumer (or perhaps also the consumer who's high). Big companies are obviously rolling in dough if they can casually drop $4 million to show off their wares on TV for all of 30 seconds. By the firm's reckoning, the price of a ticket to the Super Bowl has risen some 292% since 1999, compared with 172% for sporting events generally.

So the next time you hear an economist bellyaching that there's no inflation, ask with the proper incredulity if he ever bothered to glance at the trajectory of the price of a Super Bowl ticket.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE STREET, the stock market continued its laborious or doughty (depending on whether you're bearish or bullish) push higher, despite a plethora of Doubting Thomases. Investors, from supposedly sophisticated pros to shivering innocents sticking a tentative toe in the water, were bedazzled by a torrent of reports on the economy, which only added to the confusion since they were not infrequently contradictory. Uncle Sam dutifully did his part by larding the numbers with revisions and additions that somehow managed to turn sow's ears into silk purses.

There's no better example of this legerdemain than the eagerly awaited report on January jobs (when you want to animate the readers' interest in otherwise boring numbers, you refer to the document as "eagerly awaited"). As it happens, jobs are the critical indicator of how well the economy is faring. And if you're looking for a label, the latest tally might reasonably be said to be nothing to write home about, worthy of that weakest of commendations: "It could have been worse."

The lead paragraph of the commentary by the Liscio Report's Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood neatly, if perhaps not consciously, captures the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of last month's employment figures. To wit: "This was an OK report, with headline payroll growth a little below recent averages, though revisions to back months gave it a stronger undertone than first glance would suggest. Although annual changes to the population controls made monthly comparisons difficult, the household survey was weaker than its establishment counterpart."

All told, employers added 157,000 jobs in January (all of which and then some came from the private sector). Construction chipped in an outsized 28,000 (thank heavens for Sandy?). Federal and local governments were responsible for most of the 9,000 payroll reductions. One troubling sign is that temp firms were down 8,000, compared with an average monthly addition of 11,000, and, whatever its sins, temporary hiring is presumably a forecaster of things to come in the job market.

As noted, there were revisions aplenty, mostly to the upside: 41,000 in December and a whacking 86,000 in November. Diffusion indices, which give you a pretty good feel for how widespread the improvement or deterioration in the job market across industry lines, were, it grieves us to relate, weak. To our data demons, Doug and Philippa, they evince narrowing employment growth.

All of which echoes a refrain heard often in recent months: that we're slowly, alas so very slowly, making progress recovering the jobs lost during the great recession. Philippa and Doug calculate it would take nearly five years at recent rates of household employment growth -- or 10.6 million jobs—to get back to the old employment/population ratio. Ugh!

Despite the flaccid jobs number, average hourly earnings enjoyed a more-than-respectable 0.2% rise, lifting the three-month average to 0.3%, its best in four years. The Liscio duo point out that there does seem to be a pick-up in wage gains, but admit that it's tough to tell whether this reflects a change in the mix of jobs or a general wage pressure. They point out, too, that aggregate payrolls were up only 3.1% for the year, the feeblest reading in almost three years. It's odd, they exclaim, to see hourly pay increase while aggregate earnings wane.

The household survey, if anything, is more quixotic than the payroll measure. Except for changes in the way it is calculated, household employment would have shrunk by 110,000 -- or a whopping 351,000 when adapted to the payroll concept. As Doug and Philippa stress, changes in this yardstick are invariably volatile, so one must be careful not to give them too much weight. Still, the yearly change in adjusted household employment is now down 0.9%, versus 1.5% for the payroll count. They submit that this could be reversed in February, but they caution it bears watching in the coming months since it "can give warning of turns in the cycle" (not exactly a comforting possibility).

Philippa and Doug conclude their analysis by expressing disappointment with the pace at which jobs are being added. "Wage growth is good news for those with jobs," they say, "but there are still too many without jobs." On the positive side in their view, there's nothing in the report that's "going to change the Fed's mind about extraordinary accommodation, either." We never thought there was.